Thursday, December 14, 2000

Threatened FW Gastropods of the Southeast

I'm just back from a three day meeting sponsored by The Nature Conservancy on endangered aquatic animals of the piedmont and southeastern coastal plain. The region of interest for this particular meeting was very tightly defined, but a bit weird - Atlantic drainages from the Potomac to the Ocmulgee-Altamaha, plus the upper half of a couple Gulf drainages (Flint, Chattahoochee, Tallapoosa).

TNC had received prior info from the Natural Heritage and nongame offices of the various states, so they started with a pretty good working list. Their list was mostly vertebrates and mussels, as you might expect, with a fair number of crustaceans & insects and a few snails.

Basically, TNC just wants to know where rare and threatened aquatic organisms are currently living. They want the most recent data available on whether these populations are large or small, threatened or safe. They specifically listed two planorbids, two hydrobiids, and a pleurocerid:

I have contacted Bill Adams, who sent me the most recent info on H. magnifica. (Thanks, Bill!) Charles Watson has also kindly sent me his manuscript on the Georgia hydrobiids, soon to appear in the FMCS Proceedings. Charles mentioned one additional Georgia hydrobiid that I'd neglected: Somatogyrus rheophilus (Thanks, Charles!)

I would be curious to know if any of you other members of the FWGNA group might have additional information on the distribution & status of these 13 species. And more broadly, I'd be interested to hear whatever thoughts you all might offer regarding other endangered freshwater gastropods from the southeastern Piedmont & Coastal Plain.